Invocation

So sing to me, Muse of Division IV

(whose name is Crystal; dirty-haired, she holds

a half-drunk Keystone can), of Golden Empire

League basketball in 1995,

Paul Wickwire making threes, left-handed arcs

I tracked, like Galileo, for seven months.

The gyms were little coals in mountain dark.

What lasts is only the fidelity

of every game, each player like a needle

on time’s slow vinyl, making mystic marks,

the dusty averages that fell from youth.

And when the final buzzer stalled the air

in Golden Sierra’s gym, we’d bothered just

the wax-thick floor, and left just all our parents.

For A Bartender

Whenever any poet, businesslike

and facile, crows that everything is girls

and objects disappointing boys, or vice

vice versa (guilty too) I think of how

my beer appeared before I had a notion

of needing it, on gorgeous Monday nights

stuck in the bar we shouldn’t have enjoyed

but did, the conscious air of New York State

around us cramped with thought and the unspent

energies of God, or local forces--bugs 

consumed with light in Central Park and us

Wii bowling like you’d never fucking think,

unrequired to say the best and coarsest

enchantment of life is grace before feeling.

elizabeth poreba